Todoist is excellent at what it does: quick capture and management of personal to-dos. It isn't designed to hold the reasoning behind a project's decisions, or the state of an in-progress body of work. That's the gap ContextOS fills.
Where Todoist wins
Extremely fast personal task capture
Simple, clean interface with strong mobile app
Good recurring task and reminder system
Where ContextOS wins
Tracks project-level decisions and history, not individual tasks
Built specifically for the resume-after-a-gap problem
AI resume brief reconstructs project state, not just a task list
Side by side
Feature
Todoist
ContextOS
Primary purpose
Personal daily task lists
Structured project memory
Unit of work
Tasks to check off
Sessions, decisions, next action
Project state
Task counts
Timeline + context health
Resume after time away
Stale task list
AI resume briefing
Decision history
None
Built-in with reasons
Best for
Daily to-do capture
Knowing where a project stands weeks later
The honest take
These serve different scales — Todoist for daily task capture, ContextOS for project-level memory across longer gaps. Most users of ContextOS keep a task tool like Todoist for the day-to-day list.